


Magnetic Core

by sevenofspade



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 11:01:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14831042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: The Fire Ashari were the first stop on Keyleth's Aramente. There, she met a young woman called Raishan.





	Magnetic Core

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this!

Keyleth arrived in Pyrah a week before the Feast of Candles. She had not packed her headdress, much less the rest of her ceremony clothing. For the first time it struck her as a grave oversight.

The fire Ashari were putting up candles already, on every street corner, at every window, on garlands strewn between trees, anywhere that could possibly hold a candle and quite a few places that couldn't.

Keyleth walked and spun along the main road. The Feast of Candles had never started so early back home, nor seemed so grand.

She walked into someone.

Mortified, she turned around to help the person up. It was a girl about her own age, perhaps a year or two younger. She had bright, poison green eyes and a shy smile.

"I'm Keyleth. Sorry."

"Raishan." The girl kept talking, but Keyleth did not understand her. The Druidic Raishan spoke was stilted and the words did not mutate. If this was how the Fire Ashari spoke, Keyleth was in trouble. She had known there would be differences -- famously the Fire Ashari did not pronounce Zs -- but not this much and she could not very well talk to the leaders of this place in Common. She was pretty sure doing that would straight up fail her Aramente.

Raishan had stopped talking.

Because Keyleth's mind had been on Common, she spoke in that language. "I'm sorry. I do not understand."

"You speak Common!" Raishan's smile split her face. She had, Keyleth noticed, extremely sharp. Her lips were chapped.

"I do," Keyleth said.

"The people here are too kind," Raishan said. "Even those who speak Common will not speak it to me, so that I may learn Druidic faster."

"Does it work?" Keyleth asked.

Raishan paused. Adjusted her hair. Silence dragged. Finally, when Keyleth was feeling so awkward she seriously considered turning into a newt, Raishan spoke. "Somewhat."

Keyleth nodded.

The silence returned, feeling even heavier.

"It is the Feast of Candles," Keyleth said. As soon as she spoke she began reconsidering the newt option.

"It is lovely," Raishan said. She pulled a strand of her hair behind her ear. She smiled shyly at Keyleth. "Have you been to one of these before?"

"Oh, yes! Not a fire Ashari celebration, obviously, but I have mean to many celebrations with the Air Ashari." Keyleth was on surer footing now.

"Are you Air Ashari?" Raishan asked. "You are far from home."

"It is my Aramente," Keyleth replied.

"You are the Voice of the Tempest." Raishan's smile grew sly for a second before she hid it behind her hand.

"Maybe one day." Keyleth leaned against her staff, feeling the weight of her task on her shoulders like a cloak of thunder. Hard enough to travel the world, harder still to lead.

Raishan reached out and took her hand. She held it carefully, as though Keyleth should flee her very touch. Her fingers were cold. "You are powerful."

A shiver went through Keyleth at that and she felt her cheeks burn. She left her hand in Raishan's grasp.

"Have tea with me," Raishan said.

* * *

Raishan had been kind enough to help Keyleth acquire a headdress for the feast. The lace was white and delicate like dainty smoke. Keyleth pulled up her hair in a bun and began constructing the headdress. The lace itself was different from home and when the headdress unravelled she started to cry.

She had not failed at putting on a headdress since her mother had been alive and a spike of grief of had skewered her heart at the realisation.

Keyleth cried silently. Not out of shame or concern that Raishan would hear, but simply because this was a private pain.

She wiped her tears away.

She stood and restarted braiding her hair. It was not how the women here wore their hair for feast days but it was how she wore it. She knew how to tie a headdress to a braided bun. She had come here to learn, not to forget who she was or where she came from.

She finished her braids and twisted them into a bun. She druid crafted a few inch-long pins to secure it, then secure the headdress on top of it. The folds of white lace obscured what little pins emerged from her hair.

"Keyleth?" Raishan called. "Do you need any help?"

"I can dress myself!" The words came out harsher than Keyleth intended and she cringed at the sound of them, echoing through the empty space around her.

"Oh. Alright, then."

Keyleth rushed to the door and grabbed Raishan's wrist as she turned away. "Raishan! Wait. Please?"

Raishan held still, eyes unblinking and not even a muscle moving. She looked like a lizard, surprised or frightened. Despite this Keyleth envied her that stillness. She was never still herself, never felt calm. Always her mind buzzed with worry in every direction.

"I'm sorry," Keyleth said. She cradled Raishan's hand. "I did not mean to be so harsh. I do appreciate your help."

* * *

There was not a single surface that didn't hold too many candles for it. It looked like the whole world was on fire. The smoke was grey or black or white depending on the candle, but it all rose together in a fascinating ballet. Keyleth followed them up, twisting her neck. There, above the main square, was a warp of sorts in the air. Raishan was staring at it, eyes bright.

"Don't worry," Keyleth said. When Raishan snapped towards her, she continued, "It is not a rift to the fire plane."

"Maybe one day." Raishan licked her lips.

Keyleth took her hand and squeezed it in reassurance.

Raishan froze, lizard still. "Dance with me."

Keyleth nodded.

They danced. It was a whirlwind of feet and jumps and though the dance was usually dance with more than two, they were never more than two for very long. Keyleth found she liked this. She liked Raishan. 

Keyleth's cheeks burned with something more than the heat of the dance. It might have been her imagination, but she thought Raishan's smile when she looked at her was interested.

Raishan broke off the dance first, tugging Keyleth towards the refreshments. She handed Keyleth a bowl of cider. Keyleth clinked it against Raishan's own and drank. She drank avidly, thirsty from the dance. Raishan drank slower, with smaller sips. She was still halfway through her first bowl when Keyleth was done with her second.

Between them and the others, the pitchers had run dry.

Raishan offered her glass to Keyleth. It was the fine glasses of great occasions, crystal chiselled with untold skill.

Keyleth folded her hands over it, almost afraid she would break it, and pushed it towards Raishan. "I've drunk enough."

"Are you sure? I was saving it for you." Raishan smiled alluringly and pushed the drink towards Keyleth.

"I'm sure," Keyleth said, "but thank you."

Raishan shrugged and chugged back the rest of the drink violently. "Let's dance more."

Keyleth shook her head.

Raishan's face fell.

"Sit with me a while?" There was a stone bench under a nearby tree. Keyleth gestured towards it.

Raishan went to sit and Keyleth sat next to her. Their thighs were touching. Keyleth's face heat up again and she looked away.

"Hey." Raishan touched Keyleth's chin to turn her face. "You do not have to stay with me if you do not want to. I'm sure you have important Voice of the Tempest Aramente business to attend to."

"I don't!" Keyleth protested. "I mean I do, but not now. Right now, I want to spend this moment with you."

The smoke of the candles obscured the moon, leaving its light looking slightly greenish around the edges. They were both still sweaty from the dance. They kissed. 

Or rather, Keyleth kissed Raishan, seized by some inexplicable urge.

* * *

Raishan found Keyleth outside of town. Keyleth was sitting on the bank of what was more a pond than a lake, legs outstretched in the watercress and bare heels in the shallow water. Raishan crouched next to her. "Are you avoiding me?"

"No." The water rippled with the light, anxious trembling of her feet.

Raishan put a hand on Keyleth's knee. Raised a brow.

"Maybe." Keyleth pulled her knees to her chest.

Raishan's hand ended up hovering uncertainly in the air and she looked hurt. "Why?"

"I did not mean to kiss you," Keyleth said. She said it like it hurt her soul -- because it did.

It was nothing to the hurt that bloomed on Raishan's face. She stood. Like poison she spat at Keyleth, "I see."

Keyleth swore. The incongruity of it was enough to slow Raishan, if not stop her. Keyleth rushed to her feet, almost falling over herself in her haste, but for once her clumsiness did not get in her way too much and she managed to catch up to Raishan.

"That's not what I meant," Keyleth said. "I meant that I kissed you without knowing if you wanted it and I did not know how to deal with that."

"You deal with that by kissing me again," Raishan said. Her face was unreadable.

"You want this, then?" Keyleth asked. Truth be told she was unsure herself if she wanted this -- it moved so fast.

Raishan kissed her, by way of an answer.

* * *

Later, when the afternoon was beginning to edge into evening, Raishan said, "Will you teach me magic?"

"Magic?"

"Yes. You are the future Voice of the Tempest. You must be so powerful!" Raishan accompanied her words by tracing Keyleth's knuckles and locking their fingers together. She brushed a kiss to the tip of Keyleth's fingers. 

Keyleth wasn't so sure about any of that.

"Please. Teach me magic," Raishan repeated. Again, she slipped from Common into Druidic -- not Druidic as the Fire Ashari spoke it but as the Air Ashari did. It was this that convinced Keyleth to do as Raishan suggested. She missed home with an ache in her chest that sometimes stole her breath away.

Over the next while they spent their evenings with druidcraft. Keyleth taught and Raishan learned. Raishan was a very quick study; sometimes it looked more like she was remembering than learning. She had a way of asking things that pushed Keyleth to go further, look into more details at things. That and Keyleth wanted to impress her. She threw herself further into her own studies, trying to keep ahead of Raishan.

* * *

"Witness," Raishan said, "the glory of me!"

Keyleth hid a smile. "I am witnessing."

Raishan read from the book, words crisp and perfect, every vowel rounded as it was meant to, not a consonant out of place. She waved her hand imperiously. Some small part of jealous of Raishan's confidence.

The spell began to form. A swirl of green above Raishan's palm resolved into an apple from a nearby tree.

"Ah!" Raishan let out a delighted laugh when the apple fell into her hand. She dropped the book. "Look!" She offered the apple to Keyleth.

Keyleth took it. It looked like an apple. It felt like an apple. It had the weight, the smell, the smooth skin that broke under her nails. Sweet juice flowed down her fingers. Raishan bent forward and licked at it.

Keyleth's cheeks burned. She held up the apple and bit into it. It had the tart taste of apples in this season.

Raishan had done it. Transportation through another plane across short distances.

Keyleth kissed Raishan in the joy of knowledge. The kiss tasted of apples.

* * *

When Keyleth found the tree stride spell she wanted to try it for Raishan. It was slightly ahead of her learnings but with Raishan's sharp mind at her side Keyleth was confident she could pull it off.

Keyleth had chosen the trees at either end of the spell -- one by the river in Pyrah, one back home, in the garden of her mother -- and Raishan had gathered the elements for the spell. Keyleth had briefly thought to make it a surprise, but she didn't know if she could do it without Raishan. Raishan had improved on several of the spells Keyleth had taught her. She'd improved on them via trial and error, but with an eerie and genius-like intuition. Together they could do this and do it now.

"Drink this," Raishan said. She handed Keyleth a glass chiselled of fine crystal -- it looked much like the one from the feast of candle ceremony -- and smelling faintly of mead.

Keyleth drank. Warmth and power flowed through her veins. Lightning crackled in her bones. For a moment she _was_ the Tempest. 

Raishan took her hand. Her skin began flaking and peeling, revealing scales beneath. In her altered state, Keyleth saw nothing wrong with this or the echo of Raishan's voice when she spoke. "Open the gate."

Keyleth gathered the power within her, thunder, lightning, blood, bone, raw animal strength and a veneer of academic learning. She opened her hand and the world resisted her. She roared in defiance.

Another power joined hers. Small. Ancient. Desperate. Poisonous. Poisoned.

"Open!" Raishan screamed.

The world wobbled and warped. There was a tear there, something like a smoke spasm. Keyleth tore it open.

Flames clawed at her face. Keyleth stumbled back and dropped Raishan's hand. Raishan was laughing. It was an ugly laugh, too big for her throat -- until it wasn't. Raishan's human skin had finished scaling away in the scorching heat.

She was free to unfold into a green dragon. Keyleth stared in abject betrayal and mute horror at Raishan's true self and the disease coursing within. Then she saw behind Raishan.

There was a gate open to the Fire Plane. _She_ had opened a gate to the Fire Plane. She had one job!

Already a giant, lumbering form was stepping through the gate. A red dragon who looked as sick as Raishan, but where her disease had shot through her and stunted her growth, its own had spread like wildfire and bubbled out its limbs into misshapes.

Keyleth tried to throw a spell, shield or spear, anything, but she was spent, her magic all but destroyed in the act that heralded the beginning of the world's end. 

The red dragon drew back its head to end her, but Raishan stopped him. They had better things to do.

Keyleth remained on the ground. She found out she was crying from the way the salt of her tears stung at her burnt flesh. She laid curled there, unable to move, for a long time. 

What was left of the Fire Ashari found her the next day, still broken, still oozing, still crying.

It took her a long time to be able to walk again, but her magic never returned. She left as soon as she could, draping herself in what remained of her dignity. There was a dragon for her to defeat, a broken heart to mend and enemies to crush.

* * *

She wondered the world. 

In Stillben she drank the water and was sick for days. She travelled to Vasselheim and fought in the Crucible. She bought a cloak in Westruun. 

She sailed to sea on a ship captain by a gnome cleric of Sarenrae.

She met J'Mon Sa Ord over the water in Ank'Harel and spent a week or two as their concubine before her revenge grew restless again. 

In Nicodranas the Ruby of the Sea took pity on her. In Zadash she got into a bar fight with a purple jerk who was more peacock than tiefling.

* * *

On the beach of Glintshore, she met an angel of vengeance. She was missing a hand and her coat fluttered like wings. She smiled -- she smiled like Raishan had once smiled. Keyleth hadn't known how to read that smile then, but she did now and had paid a hard price for that knowledge.

Something exploded and the woman's smile widened. "We have a deal?"

It was barely a question.

"The explosion. Where did come from?" Keyleth asked.

"Black powder!" The speaker was an old man. "I make it!" 

"Thank you, Victor," the woman said. Raishan had never sounded so harsh, but then Keyleth hadn't really known Raishan, had she? 

Keyleth forcibly stepped away from that train of thought.

"You are?"

"Keyleth." No family claim until she fixed her mistake. "I seek to destroy the Diseased Deceiver."

"Doctor Ripley." She said it like the doctor was the important part. "I have no such lofty goals."

"What goals do you have?"

"Closing this deal."

There was something more here. Keyleth turned to leave. This was none of her concern.

"You look familiar," Doctor Ripley suddenly said. "Raishan, was it?"

Rage surged in Keyleth so strongly that she lost herself.

Fur grew. Teeth lengthened into fangs. Nails turned to claws. Before her or Doctor Ripley knew it, Keyleth was a tiger, powerful muscles rippling under her new-shaped skin and snarling in Ripley's face.

Ripley did not step back. She drew a metal contraption and pointed it between Keyleth's eyes. It looked not entirely unlike a crossbow where the actual bow part had been streamlined into nothing. Keyleth could barely see it due to the tears of joy in her eyes.

Her magic was back.

She turned back into her proper shape slowly as she stepped away from Doctor Ripley. Doctor Ripley's contraption neither wavered nor strayed. It remained aimed squarely at Keyleth's brow.

Keyleth wiped away her tears.

"You wear her face but you are not Raishan," Doctor Ripley said.

"She wears _my_ face." Keyleth spat. In a handful of words Doctor Ripley had turned her joy back into fury. It was Keyleth's face, she'd crafted it as carefully as a goldsmith crafted jewellery.

"You drive a poor bargain," Doctor Ripley said. She kicked the frayed end of Keyleth's cloak. "She at least offered me riches and glory and that was only for my knowledge."

"Your knowledge?"

"She is diseased. I am a Doctor of medicine." She left the rest of it hanging there, obvious like storm clouds.

It was an obvious conclusion, and Keyleth was the tempest. "You have no need for riches or glory. You want knowledge?"

"Knowledge I have. Knowledge of her and her disease I have. What I want is revenge." Doctor Ripley put away the contraption. "I have enemies, highborn in Wildemount and elsewhere. I want them dead, destroyed, crushed, left to rot face down in the dust." She was as venomous as Raishan had ever been. Something in Keyleth fluttered.

"Can you kill her?" Keyleth asked.

"Make it worth my while." Doctor Ripley smiled, teeth shining like sword metal. "My revenge against yours."

Keyleth did. Being the Voice of the Tempest -- in interim, in waiting -- opened many doors that would have remained closed to Dr Anna Ripley, MD, PhD. She did not kill all of the people on Ripley's List, but that was only because the necromancer proved to have a plan for this.

It was a necromancer's hex, twisted into a containment spell. Something new, burning blue.

"Anna sent you, I suppose," the necromancer said. She came to stand between Keyleth and her smouldering husband -- sunlight still echoed in the dark of these catacombs.

Keyleth regarded her quizzically. She was, but she was also curious how the necromancer knew. Doctor Ripley had told her the Briarwoods had left her for dead.

Lady Briarwood continued, "Please. I've seen the list of those you've killed, or should I say, the list of those the lightning killed. They are Anna's enemies, missing only a scant few. I imagine if you live here you will have no trouble with them."

Keyleth nodded her thanks. There was a twisted pride in being the doctor's perfect assassin.

"Has she achieved self-resurrection or did my love's strike miss the killing blow?" It sounded like idle curiosity, but after Raishan Keyleth knew better than to trust its idleness.

"You missed," Keyleth said. It was true enough, in its way. The sword had missed the heart by a hair's breadth, just enough not to kill instantly. Doctor Ripley mastery of magic and knowledge of anatomy had done the rest. A hasty, rushed job it had been, leaving her chest with a starburst scar from collarbones to navel, but had done its job and Ripley had lived.

"Pity," Lady Briarwood said. "I thought she might have finally proved useful by improving on my design."

Keyleth found a weakness in the hex and hammered it with the full force of the storm within herself. It broke apart, splintering like glass. Behind it was another containment spell and another and another and many more, woven together like a net.

"You will break this as well, in time," Lady Briarwood said. "But I will offer you a better deal than Anna."

Keyleth laughed like thunder.

"I broke the world for my husband once." Lady Briarwood picked her husband off the floor. He smiled at Keyleth, or at least he bared his bloody teeth at her.

"I don't care," Keyleth said. Her shadow seemed to whisper at the edges of her mind. "I want my vengeance and I will have it."

"She promised you vengeance like she promised me. Do not trust her." 

"How big of a fool do you take me for?"

Lady Briarwood let the question hang there. Keyleth hated when people did that, it forced her mind to come up with all the possible answers they might give her and made her worry. She figured that was Lady Briarwood did it.

Lady Briarwood took her husband's sword. "Listen. I have no quarrel with you or your vengeance. Leave my husband and I be and there need not be any blood shed between us. Take this sword to Anna. She will think us as dead as we thought her."

Lord Briarwood pulled his wife closer. Speaking low enough that Keyleth would not have heard him without the bat ears hiding beneath her hair, he said, "My love. Our god."

"We do not need the sword," she replied. "There are other souls than these." She threw the sword inside Keyleth's containment.

Her magic was weak. She could only contain Keyleth, because some great working had sapped her strength before Keyleth even got to this buried pyramid. The woman had mentioned self-resurrection. Her husband was whatever he was. Enemies who would not stay dead were not something Keyleth fancied taking on. She was tired from the hunt and breaking the first hunt.

And she was not fool enough to trust Ripley entirely.

She picked up the sword.

* * *

At long last Keyleth returned to Ripley. "They are not your concern anymore."

"I heard. My lady regicide." She etched a courtly bow and kissed the back of Keyleth's hand.

Keyleth's other hand tightened on her staff but she refused to take the bait. She pulled herself out of Ripley's grip. Ripley straightened. She showed Keyleth her work. It was a further prototype of a gun, and its bullets. Its bullet. 

"Just one?" Keyleth held it to the light. It glowed faintly in the setting sun, but it was still a single bullet. It was bigger than Ripley's usual bullets, but not outrageously so. The length of Keyleth's hand, the width of her thumb.

Ripley plucked the bullet from her hand. "Yes. I melted a Vestige for this. Those do not grow on trees."

"You did what?!" Regicide was one thing, but blasphemy... Well. It was good Keyleth knew neither clerics nor paladins.

"She labours under the curse of a dead prophet. It is more divine retribution than simple disease. She is not meant to die from it, she is meant to suffer from it, to see herself slowly stripped of everything she is. It is a blight, a scourge, but it keeps her alive. She cannot suffer if she is dead. So, you see, to kill her you must commit blasphemy." Ripley's eyes shone like the bullet did.

"Which." Keyleth swallowed. "Which Vestige?"

"Whisper. It was a dagger. No great loss to the world and if it is a great loss to the gods, they can tell me in person," Ripley said. She set the bullet down next to the gun. It sounded like a funeral knell.

"You can kill her? Are you sure?"

"Just bring her to me."

If you asked Keyleth, she occasionally felt like she was doing all the work in this relationship, then Ripley came out with something like _reforging divine artefacts_. Ripley's mind was a thing of beauty. It was horrific, but it was beautiful and worked like no one else's.

For months Keyleth and Ripley tried to lure Raishan into a trap, to no avail.

In the end, they tracked her down. To Pyrah. Keyleth decided to make things simpler for everyone. She walked into Pyrah, head held high and called out Raishan by name.

Raishan took her time. All the better to make her entrance more dramatic. She flew, the wind of her wings tangling Keyleth's hair. She could have walked.

The sight of her brought the lightning back to Keyleth's limbs and she unfolded into a draconic shape of her own, snarling and teeth aimed at Raishan's throat.

"What happened to foreplay?" Raishan asked. Seconds before Keyleth made impact, Raishan turned into a hawk.

Keyleth became the Tempest in truth, then. She was lightning, she was thunder, she was the storm itself, clouds and heavy air. Sparks and ozone pursued the hawk.

The hawk dove and became a snake, burrowing in the earth, far from thunder, lightning and rain.

Keyleth retaliated. She became a fox from harsh northern climes, slick fur and snapping jaws, burrowing in the earth. It was too warm for this much fur here, but that didn't matter, not when she had her teeth digging into the serpent's scales.

Her jaw clenched and snapped on empty air. A bee buzzed inside the earthen tunnel. It stung her. Raishan.

The fox mind panicked. Was this bee or wasp, was this poisonous? Two could play that game. Keyleth grew legs and shrank in size but kept her silver fur. She began weaving. Soon her web was trapping Raishan.

Raishan broke the spiderweb by becoming a praying mantis.

It was Keyleth's turn to grow scales. A lizard she became. Instantly she found herself in the grip of a human hand. She rotated her eyes to see behind her and found her face looking back at her.

A crack of thunder rang out over the desolate city plaza.

For a moment Keyleth was confused. She was not the storm and this was not her thunder. There had been no lightning preceding it. Then Raishan crumpled, collapsing like her feet were made of clay, a red flower blooming on her chest. 

Ripley.

Ripley had come through.

She had come through and now she was coming over with Dealmaker, her now broken long-barrel gun, slung over her shoulder. She knelt next to Raishan, who still wore Keyleth's face. It was her body and her clothes too, she could tell. Had Ripley known this was Raishan before she shot?

Keyleth turned back into herself. Ripley nodded to her, one professional to another, as she kept prodding the corpse for signs of life. She shot it again.

There was something surreal and profoundly unsettling about seeing her corpse on the ground, Keyleth thought. Her heart was trying to crawl out of her chest. She was shaking like trees in a gale. There were still scales at the edges of her, her transformation unfinished with horror. Was this what she would become, a ruin of a great mind, a bloody end to a bloody life, consumed by revenge as surely as Raishan had been consumed by her disease? No. She would not allow it. She would not die like this.

When she did not look directly at Raishan, it was easy enough not to think about her face splattered on the cobblestones. The blood was seeping into the ground, leaving nothing behind, not even the bullet's faint glow. Then plants began to grow. Local weeds and flowers, blooming and rotting in the blink of an eye.

Keyleth had her revenge. It felt... hollow. Nothing had changed. The Fire Plane had still been opened. The Ashari were still dead. Thordak still raged. She could not turn back time.

Raishan coughed.

Ripley stood and kicked her in the ribs. Raishan rolled away.

Her bones felt like water and she was spent, but Keyleth struggled to get to her feet. She scrambled for her staff. She found it. Ripley held out a hand to her. Keyleth took it gratefully, the metal cold under her fingers. Ripley pulled her up.

With her other hand she drew a different gun and fired its entire load into Raishan's face.

Keyleth pulled on her hand. "No!"

"I have never known you to be kind." Ripley raised an eyebrow at her. She holstered the empty gun and drew another. She fired that one too.

"Wait," Keyleth said. "Wait. How did she survive the shot?"

"You killed my curse," Raishan said. She held out the bullet, faint divine glow visible in the oncoming dusk, before squirrelling it away. "Not me."

Ripley drew another gun -- her second or third to last -- but held her fire. Keyleth let her hand go. She leaned heavily on her staff.

"I suppose," Raishan said, Keyleth's lips curled back into a draconian snarl, "that I must thank you."

Keyleth didn't want Raishan's thanks. She wanted her revenge for the Ashari dead. Raishan had freed Thordak to heal herself. Thordak had to be defeated and Keyleth and Ripley had barely managed to wound Raishan and then only because they had had surprise and Raishan's disease on their side and Raishan hadn't been taking the duel seriously.

She wanted Raishan to stop wearing her face. 

"You can thank us by taking down Thordak," Keyleth said.

"On my own? Frail as I am?" Raishan laughed, blood on her teeth. "Even in my prime I would have been no physical match for Thordak or his progeny. And now... he is twisted by the Fire Plane and his own hate. There may not be a mind left within the beast."

"I don't care!" The scream tore itself from Keyleth's throat. "You freed him. He's here because of you. You have to stop him, even if it kills you."

"What a nice speech," Raishan said. "Is it directed to me or yourself?"

Keyleth punched her. It broke several bones in her hand. Raishan was a master shapeshifter, blending aspects together -- dragon bones under an elfin skin.

Ripley laughed. "What? She had a point."

Keyleth stared at them both. It was only then that she noticed Raishan was wearing her face, healed and whole. She had changed it, but Keyleth couldn't remember when.

Keyleth needed Thordak dead. the world needed Thordak dead. Thordak and his... Progeny?

She couldn't do it alone or even with Raishan, frail as she was and still bleeding from bullet wounds. Maybe, with Ripley and her guns...

"You owe me a dragon's death," Keyleth told Ripley.

* * *

"You shot me," Keyleth said.

"Yet here you stand, healthy and whole." Ripley was cleaning the joints of her metal hand, not looking at Keyleth. There was grit there and blood and bone.

"Did you know it was Raishan you would hit before you took the shot?" Keyleth shook her head, trying to clear the image of her corpse from her mind.  
"What do you think?"

"I don't know," Keyleth said truthfully. "I wouldn't ask if I did."

Ripley snapped the hand back into place and flexed the fingers like claws. "Did I use the Vestige bullet? That tells you all you need."

* * *

"You use electricity to generate a magnetic field," Raishan said. "Clever, but I fail to see the point."

"How does it feel to be outwitted by a metal coil?" Ripley did not even look up at Raishan from where she was cleaning her gun.

Raishan's claws dug into the coil and broke it. Keyleth rolled her eyes. She was leaning against the wall in the corner, in the only place the egos in the room left her.

"The thing in Thordak is ferric," Keyleth said.

"Ferrous," the other two corrected her at the same time.

"I see. You hope to rip it off and kill him that way," Raishan said. "It won't work. It is embedded too deeply into him. There is no force in this world than can rip it away. Never mind your feeble magnetism." She dropped the coil, disgust in every line of her.

"You don't know much about physics, do you." It was phrased like a question, but it didn't sound like one. It sounded like a sneer.

The rest of the conversation-slash-argument was the two of them slinging insults and formulae at each other.

Keyleth picked up the coil. Raishan's claws had heavily dented the metal. Ripley had disserted at length on the properties of the coil: its composition, the number of its coils, the size of the cable... Keyleth and Ripley had went through seven iterations of the coil before this one. They hadn't even gotten to test this one, yet!

The coil had to be perfect. They would only get one shot at this. She sighed and put the coil back into the crucible. It would have to be reforged. If the coil's diameter was not uniform...

She could reforge it herself, come to think of it. She crouched to be level with the furnace and snapped a spark of lightning into it. She looked up to find Ripley pointing at her.

"I see your point," Raishan said.

* * *

There was a river, on Glintshore. It was barely more than a stream at the best of times, and in summer it was nothing at all, but it was not summer. Keyleth let her feet trail in the water. It was soothing.

In a flash of green light an apple materialised in front of Keyleth. It fell in her lap.

Having made her entrance, Raishan stepped into view. She was the girl she had been when Keyleth had first met her, before the war had started. Before she had started the war. 

She sat, facing Keyleth.

"What do you want?" Keyleth spat the words like poison. She took the apple in her hands and ripped it in two with a twist of her hand.

"An apple," Raishan said. She tried to take half the apple from Keyleth. Keyleth closed her fingers and bared her teeth. Raishan pulled back her hand. "To talk, then."

"Talk, then," Keyleth repeated, copying Raishan's voice.

Raishan twitched but otherwise ignored the jab. "I would not have freed Thordak had I any other choice. He promised me freedom from my curse if I gave him freedom from his prison."

"And you believed him?" Keyleth felt like laughing, so she did. It sounded like Ripley's laugh, harsh and forgiving.

"No." Raishan waited for Keyleth's laughter to end before adding, "I did not believe him, but I was out of options. Had I but met Anna or you before that plan was hatched --"

"You did meet me before that plan was hatched." Keyleth stood and dusted herself off.

"Have you never set yourself on a path and finding you were wrong to do so came too late?" Raishan asked.

Keyleth thought about meeting Raishan and kissing her, about Ripley too. The thought about Ripley's vengeance and the blood on both their hands. She thought about allying with Raishan to fight Thordak. She thought of her deal in the dark with Delilah Briarwood. She thought about the sword that whispered to her, same as her shadow did, and how both were Ripley's sins as much as hers and the sword twice over. She thought of all that and more.

"No," she told Raishan. "I know how to change my mind."

Raishan was silent. She looked at Keyleth with the unnervingly unblinking gaze of a lizard. "You will be a great Voice of the Tempest."

Keyleth left, but she couldn't help take it as a compliment.

* * *

Unlike Raishan, Thordak was easy to track down. _He_ wasn't hiding. He was in Emon -- there had been a blue dragon there, masquerading as an advisor to the king, and he had defied Thordak. There was neither adviser nor king left in Emon. There wasn't much of anything left in Emon. Just Thordak and his hoard.

Keyleth opened a tree stride door into a village near Emon. She'd tracked one of Ripley's enemies through this place. Raishan chuckled as she stepped through the door. Keyleth's jaw clenched. She breathed out deeply.

"Let's go," Ripley said. "Your history can wait."

Thordak and his progeny were out in the open. The ground was a battle field and eggshells littered it. There was only one hatchling left.

Thordak was eating it.

"A power-hungry beast with a hateful mind," Raishan said. How she found the wherewithal to speak was beyond Keyleth. Her own heart was just behind her teeth.

"Sounds like someone I know," Ripley said, elbowing Raishan.

Raishan's smile was small and fast, but it had the merit of existing. "I could say the same. We need to act now, while it's distracted."

Thordak's distraction allowed them to set the coil closer to him than they might otherwise have been able to. A good thing, too, because the coil wasn't powerful enough, not even with Keyleth calling the storms of the entire continent to it bear lightning down upon it. Ripley pitched in, summoning her own lightning from the divine depths of Cabal's Ruin.

The coil began overheating. Raishan lost her human shape, grabbed it between her draconic claws, Keyleth and Ripley in her other paw, and flew closer to Thordak. The cankerous mass in his chest rattled and groaned, and his child still half-eaten in his jaws, he turned his attention towards them.

Ripley shot. The shot grazed his brow. She shot again and took out his eye. Her next shot was aimed as the centre of his chest, straight for the mass. They'd practiced this, her and Keyleth, endlessly, and Keyleth had the scars to show for it. The bullet exploded in mid-air, as it was meant to. Every piece of shrapnel bounced of Thordak's scales. He'd been twisted into something other than a draconian beast.

Ripley swore. She aimed for Thordak's other eye, but it was too late. He breathed white-hot fire at them. Raishan swerved to avoid the blast. Ripley's shot went wide.

Ripley swore. 

Raishan got hit by Keyleth's lightning twice in rapid succession. She stumbled at the first and dropped at the second. Keyleth let go of the storm. Raishan's flight stabilised.

"So much for that plan." Raishan landed behind Thordak. With a twist of her hand, she tossed the coil and sent a meteor shower against Thordak.

Keyleth gathered her storm again and sent it against him.

Ripley got her gun up and ready to shoot at the same time as Thordak managed to turn around. The space here was cramped and he was gigantic.

Ripley fired. Thordak spewed fire. Cabal's Ruin ate the fire, but Ripley tore it off her shoulders and threw it away. It landed on what had been a wooden house and set fire to it with the sheer force of its residual heat.

Keyleth took position in front of Ripley, ready to ward off the rest of Thordak's fire. She raised a barrier of ice.

"You're blocking my view!" Ripley shouted. There was a flash of glinting metal behind her and Keyleth knew Ripley had drawn Silas' sword. 

Keyleth dropped the barrier. Raishan slammed into Thordak from above, pinning him to the ground. Ripley surged forward, slamming the sword in the loosened skin of Thordak's chest, between deformed scales. Keyleth took the heaviest form she could manage and, using the sword as a lever, popped the stone from Thordak's chest, ripping open a major artery and breaking the sword in the process.

The blood sprayed everywhere. Raishan reared back on pure reflex, as did Keyleth. Thordak roared. He shook himself, throwing off Raishan.

Ripley grabbed the coil.

For ease of transport and because it amplified the magnetic field by orders of magnitude, they'd wrapped it around an iron bar. Ripley shoved said iron bar into Thordak's heart.

"There. Here is your dragon death," she said. "Let's have a drink."


End file.
